Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As the secularist notion of state and religion as two separable spheres of interest grew out of religious wars, secularist public and media perceptions of international politics tend to consider many conflicts as "religious". Whereas foreign policy actors pragmatically treat the same conflicts or relational structures in terms of interests of domestic power play. This perception gap urges states to brand their foreign policy in public as more "value orientated" than their policies are in reality. As shown by Horkheimer and Adorno, the rationalist values of enlightenment turn emancipative separation of private and public, where religion belongs to the former sphere and politics to the latter, into its opposite: oppression by an absolute truth disguised as secularist, rational, "democratic" and above all – non-absolute. Instead of state vs. religious or "national interest" rhetorics, current international politics discourse seems to be framed along ethical or value based or even humanitarian lines. Outlining a short history of Western absolute enlightenment this paper argues that the gap between the presumably realist secularist foreign policy of rational, non-absolute norms, and public perception of many of the major conflicts in world politics as religious, points to the need for reconsidering basic concepts of foreign policy ”normal language” such as "values" and – "religious". One of the ways to attack this question might be through the notion of value spheres, and indeed once again the concept of (and the construction of) national interest (Morgenthau, Wendt, Weldes, Chandler).